Author: DinoEcho

Introduction

Kepler is a spacecraft that rocked the world and is currently rocking space. It is my favorite thing in the entire universe for the reason being the immense power it gives us to pursue space exploration. It is one of the best spacecrafts according to me and has the potential of putting even sci-fi planets to shame. Its power of exploration is incredibly insane. So come, join me on an amazing and exhilaratingly exciting journey of space exploration.

Start? Or Ignition?

March 6th, 2009 the first Kepler spacecraft was launched for research purposes. Kepler was carried by a Delta rocket which helped scientists to propel it straight upwards. This spacecraft was in the making for two decades. It was a great mission and very economical too. The primary reason for the creation of Kepler was to overcome the limitation that prevented scientists from exploring and studying other planets, because of excessive light by the sun.

Thus, Kepler- The Telescope came into existence which was named after the scientist Johannes Kepler.

What will we see or What we won’t?

This was the first image Kepler showed within 24 hours of the opening of the cap. Each dot indicates a star in Kepler’s journey of finding planets. Kepler’s main mission was to find a planet similar to earth and to explore the “Sick” constellation.

But during this great expedition, it stumbled and found nearly 3500 planets. And that is an insane number of planets and even the sci-fi guys couldn’t agree less. So cool right?

The way by which Kepler discovers planets is by measuring the light. Do you understand? Probably not. Let me elucidate further. If the planet comes in front of the telescope then the light will dip due to its shadow.

But the question is for how long?

Well, it takes an entire circle and is also capable of showing how far it is from the sun. If it is close to the sun then it will go around the sun faster. And if it’s distant or far then it will go around the sun much slower. In addition to that if the planet is big enough then the dip of the light will be bigger and vice-versa.

Now it’s time for the most fun and interesting part of the blog post, I’m going to reveal all the types of bizarre planets out there discovered by Kepler.

Remember the scene in STAR WARS when Luke was on Tatooine and there were two stars right. Well, Kepler 16b has two stars. The planet is a gas planet. It takes a circle or round around the sun in 229 days. It was discovered on 2011 September 15.

Do you think there can be a dark planet? Well, the answer is Yes! There can be one such as the trEs-2b. Well, first it does not consist of dark magic but is close to the sun and is the darkest planet known till date. Itplanet only reflects 1% of its light. It was discovered on 2006 August 21st.

Want to be rich. Then you’ll have to go to 55 Cancrie. It is full of pure diamond. It was discovered in February 2016. It takes 2.5 days to go around the sun. So it’s extremely hot and rich with beauty.

Have any of you seen INTERSTELLAR? Remember the scene when the protagonist went on a watery planet. Then see these two watery planets Kepler-62e and Kepler-62f. The two are 1.6 and 1.4 times bigger than the earth respectively. Kepler 62e has a bit of land but that’s it. Kepler 62f is 1200 light years away and has a host star that is 4.6 billion years old. Kepler 62e is at the same solar system as Kepler 62f. Kepler 62e takes 122 days to go around the sun.

And at last, we are going to be talking about a planet that looks exactly like ours. This is Kepler 436b “is a confirmed near-Earth-sized exoplanet”. It was discovered on 2015, 6 Jan. It’s 4.36 light years away. The star of this planet is a red dwarf. It’s in the Goldilocks zone (The life zone).

Conclusion

Well, didn’t your brains explode with this knowledge and curiosity?

Mine absolutely did.

There are about 3 000 000 000 000 trillion Earth-like planets and we have just scratched the tip of the iceberg. We have to continue exploring and researching. Never let that curiosity inside you die. Who knows we might end up living on one of these bizarre planets?